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Creating a Legendary Social Media CX Strategy

The HGS team is hosting a fantastic event focused on “how to rear a social media customer service strategy” at the legendary Ascot racecourse on Friday, 5th October 2018. With such a great venue and attendance from a range of exciting brands, there are sure to be some detailed discussions about how to create legendary social media customer interactions.

How to leverage automation, to route the right posts to the right team members

How to train agents to spot a post that is a brand crisis waiting to happen

How to tap into the creative brand voice

How to decode the voice of the customer

That’s a great range of topics covering a broad-sweeping subject. In the past decade, the way that people communicate has changed more than it did in the previous century. Smartphones have created the possibility to be constantly online, and social networks provide publishing power that was previously only available to journalists. In addition, there has been a strong shift toward the use of messaging, rather than calls. The way people communicate with their friends, family, and brands has dramatically changed in just a few short years.

The event will focus on these various areas of social media, using real examples to illustrate how legendary customer service differs from just adequate service. But I have a few views, ahead of the event, on the five points that should be built into a sound social customer experience strategy:

Social media changes fast. You might feel that you are all over social because you are offering customer service on Facebook and Twitter, but the growth is actually in other platforms, such as Snapchat. Don’t put all your eggs in one network and be prepared to change direction if social trends change.

Social interactions are transparent. This CX tool is the opposite of a voice call, where only the customer and agent can hear the call. Interactions on social channels are generally transparent and visible to every other user, which provides great opportunities for people to share examples of great service. On the flip side, if you make a mistake, then that negative experience will also be shared.

Customers drive today’s CX channels. It used to be that brands defined the phone number and email address. Now customers are deciding where and how they want to interact with brands, and all you can do it monitor what’s going on and then be there.

Omnichannel is not multichannel. You might offer support across chat, social networks, and voice, but that’s really just multichannel support. If you want to offer a real omnichannel level of support, then you need to be comfortable connecting these channels together. With this support, a chat customer can hop to voice and an agent picking up a call will see that the customer recently emailed or sent a message on another channel.

Today’s brand experience transcends mere customer service. You are designing the customer experience, not just a customer service channel. Social interactions can be focused on sales or marketing or service interactions - to the customer they are all the same thing. A customer commenting on your Instagram post doesn’t care which of your internal departments responds, just so long as there is a response and it is meaningful.

Above all, getting social media interactions right requires a cultural approach that gives your team the scope to make the customer say “wow.” Companies like Zappos have turned this wow moment into the core of their corporate culture, and that makes it easier for them to just continue using the same approach online.